Edward O. Wilson

Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an evocation of his own response to nature and an eloquent statement of the conservation ethic. Wilson argues that our natural affinity for life—biophilia—is the very essence of our humanity and binds us to all other living species.

In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that in order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. In this visionary blueprint for saving the planet (Stephen Greenblatt), Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is...

In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on...

Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career—both his successes and his failures—and his motivations for becoming a...

In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how The Insect Societies led him to write Sociobiology, and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that would better explain the relevance of biology to the understanding of human behavior.

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In a generational work of clarity and passion, one of our greatest living scientists directly addresses these three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science while overturning the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first (Discover magazine). Refashioning the story of human evolution in...

Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement.

The legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson offers his most philosophically probing work to date. Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species; and its ultimate goal, self-understanding, begins Edward Wilson's sweeping examination of the humanities and their relationship to the sciences. By studying fields as diverse as palaeontology, evolutionary biology and neuroscience, Wilson demonstrates that human creativity began...

World Literature Today Editor's Pick "Enchanting... The Poetic Species is a wonderful read in its entirety, short yet infinitely stimulating." — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and Poets House), Edward O. Wilson, renowned scientist and proponent of "consilience" or the unity of knowledge, finds...

Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche called "the rainbow colours" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence. Once criticized for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls his most expansive and advanced theories on human behaviour. Whether attempting to explicate "the Riddle of the Human...

Forming a twenty-first-century statement on Darwinian evolution, Edward O. Wilson offers a bold work of scientific thought and synthesis. Of all species that have ever existed on Earth, only one has reached human levels of intelligence and social organisation—us. Why? In Genesis, celebrated biologist Edward O. Wilson traces the great transitions of evolution, from the origin of life to the...